Chess
I’ve recently started playing chess with my son. He’s just starting, so playing against him is very easy for me, even though I’m by no means a good chess player. In order to make the game a bit more fair, and thus more fun for both of us, I want to introduce a handicap for me. I found a table with handicaps1 in the wikipedia chess handicap article. Based on this list I created the following 10 levels of play, where level 1 gives the player the most advantage.
I like the versions without giving one player multiple consecutive moves, so the game can start immediately as normal.
| level | Handicap | Eval |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Queen and pawn (remove d1 and f2) | 8.8 |
| 2 | Queen (remove d1) | 7.95 |
| 3 | Rook, knight, and pawn (remove a1, b1, and f2) | 7.33 |
| 4 | Rook and knight (remove a1 and b1) | 6.59 |
| 5 | Two knights (remove b1 and g1) | 5.64 |
| 6 | Queen for knight (remove d1 and b8) | 5.21 |
| 7 | Rook and pawn (remove a1 and f2) | 4.48 |
| 8 | Rook (remove a1) | 3.7 |
| 9 | Knight (remove b1 or g1) | 2.81 |
| 10 | Two pawns (remove c7 and f7) | 2.03 |
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Kaufman, Larry (January 2024). “Against All Odds”. New in Chess. New in Chess. pp. 70–77. ↩︎